I'm not a fan of 1950 TV game show parodies or satires of muscle magazines. Perhaps the voting machine instructions and the gardening guide was funny in the late '50s, but they're not funny now. That special report "on the state of our nation's highways"? Please.

But for all that, it's impossible not to applaud the labor of love that is Fantagraphics' slip-cased reprint of Humbugmagazine.

In 1957, five veterans of Mad and Trump -- Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Will Elder, Jack Davis and Arnold Roth -- launched Humbug, a 15-cent magazine that survived, if just barely, 11 issues.

Fantagraphics has reprinted the run with considerable style, painstakingly restoring the original art, now more than 50 years old; adding an extensive John Benson interview with Jaffee and Roth, and designing a hell of a package -- Adam Grano apparently deserves the lion's share of the credit -- around a magazine that really didn't look that good.

There are some real treats in this two-volume $60 edition: Jack Davis doing Willie Mays and Floyd Patteson; a Consumer Retorts parody on the best buys in confetti, assembled by Larry Siegel, Elder and Russ Heath; and the series of superb subscription ads by Jack Davis, including the one immediately below.

But the true revelation for me in Humbug is cartoonist R. O. Blechman. Blechman not only does the windswept cover for Humbug #9 (which he would reprise 19 years later for The New Yorker) but a marvelous string of cartoons, none of which I can find online. The best of the batch is "A White Christmas" from Humbug #6, in which Blechman returns eight times to a string of four houses in the 'burbs. In the second "strip," a black couple buys the second home from the left, much to the displeasure of the white faces in the windows of the other three homes. In the fourth panel, a cross is suddenly burning outside the newcomers' home and at the center of the strip, but soon enough the winter skies break open, draping the cross in deepening snow and eventually transforming it into the base of a snowman, a gathering point for the neighborhood children, black and white alike.

It is inspired work. Perhaps so little of Humbug is of similar quality because its creators were so obsessed with television -- clearly the dominant medium of the era -- and so tentative about satirizing or exploiting sex. Given that Hugh Hefner published Trump, it's a curious retreat.

On March 7, Fantagraphics will host an exhibition of Humbug artwork at its Seattle bookstore and gallery.